Arts & crafts – Let Toys Be Toys gift guide

December 5, 2017

If you’re looking for an arts and crafts gift, and want to shop outside the pink and blue boxes of gender stereotypes, check out our inclusive gift guide for fun arts and crafts present ideas for children.

This gift guide is a celebration of brilliant, creative toys, marketed in a way that encourages both boys and girls to explore a wonderfully diverse world of making and doing.

All shops featured on this page have received the Let Toys Be Toys “Toymark award” – our good practice award for the stores that are getting it right.

Two Mosaic Pictures are included in this great value set. An instruction booklet shows you which colour corresponds to which number, and is more complex than the mosaics for younger children. You will have lots of sticky back squares left over which can be used for your own creations

Krasnaya offers a range of easy to achieve and cute felted animal kits. Their kits use a polystyrene egg to felt onto making it much simpler and helping to avoid those painful stabbed fingers. An ideal introduction to this wonderful craft.

Brikkon have created beautifully designed ply wood structures that are compatible with LEGO®. Easily put together the plywood bases are the perfect foundation for creative model making.
The slimline packaging fits through the letter box making the kits the perfect long distant present.
£7.99 from Olive Loves Alfie

Time to become a tiger – what fun! This a delightful mask kit that will build in about 10 minutes to create a 3D sculpture for your head. And if you pull the string – it talks! Excellent instructions make this a great project that anyone can do.

This set contains 46 hard maple wooden pieces with nails, hammer and cork board. Each wooden piece has a hole in the middle for children to hammer the nail through and arrange them on the corkboard creating a picture. The peices are in the shape of various animals, people, trees, fences and clouds so there’s lots of different pictures to create. Everything can be removed and re-used to start all over again so you’re child will get lots of enjoyment from this set.

Beautifully made wooden flower press from Le Jardin du Moulin range by Moulin Roty. An ideal gift for budding little gardeners who love making pretty pictures from things they find in nature. The set includes two wooden boards, the top board is decorated with a pretty garden picture, 5 cardboard sheets and 10 sheets of thick white paper. A great activity for children, encouraging them to explore the outdoor environment and make pictures from flowers and leaves collected which they can keep and treasure as a memento of their adventure.

Discover the creative power of sand art with these genius products from Kids Bee Happy. The Laser cut, pre-glued sand art picture cards and sand pens allow for creative expression without all of the mess. This pack contains:
– 2 Small Sand Art pictures.
– 15 Tubes of Sand
– Set of tweezers
– 2 Polypocket sleeves for the finished pictures